As the website explains, "The advertisements contain the ordinary but revealing details about the missing person’s life: the county and parish of their birth, when they left Ireland, the believed port of arrival in North America, their occupation, and a range of other personal information. Some records may have as many as 50 different data fields, while others may offer only a few details. The people who placed ads were often anxious family members in Ireland, or the wives, siblings, or parents of men who followed construction jobs on railroads or canals."

The Information Wanted column pictured above (published in the Boston Pilot in 1858) reads as follows:

"Advertisements under this head are inserted three times one dollar. The immense circulation of the Pilot in every city, town, and hamlet on the American Continent, renders it the best medium through which to make inquiries about lost friends. More than three-fourths of those advertised for are found. Persons wishing their friends advertised, can send us a dollar inclosed in a letter, with the advertisement written as legibly as possible, in order that no mistakes are made by the printer."

It is one thing to study the era that saw the heavy flow of Irish immigration to America. It is another thing altogether to look one by one at the names of those immigrants sadly yet hopefully seeking their missing loved ones.

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This blog is dedicated to the memory of my great-great-grandparents Patrick Tierney of County Tipperary, Ireland and his wife Catherine (Kennedy) Tierney, who survived the Great Famine and came to Boston in search of a better life. Their humble lives are remembered here with fondness and appreciation. It is my hope that the little that we learn about their lives will strengthen us for our own times.

A light that shines again...

“…Nor less should we forget the worthy sonsAnd daughters who through centuries lived and diedUnknown to fame. The muse of history shunsTheir buried records. Gathered side by sideIn yonder burial ground, they leave no signsSave in half-obliterated linesThat tell their birth, their death. Yet not in vain,Fathers and mothers, were your humble lives;Each in its turn an influence that survives,A light that shines againIn sacred memories, and in hearths and homes,Vital as greater names that gild historic tomes…”

~ Christopher Pearce Cranch, read at the 250th anniversary of the first church in Quincy, Massachusetts